¿Qué Pasa, Lou?

"How do you feel?" Lou turns to me and says. We're in the back of his silver Audi midmorning on a steel gray New Jersey day, and we're heading from the country, where he lives, to the city, where he does his radio show, about an hour and a half away. He's working on a Wendy's cheeseburger, a Diet Coke, and a small chocolate Frosty.

"How do I feel?" I ask. He throws his shoulders back, like, How hard a question is that? He's a Brahman bull of a man with puffy hands and a dainty silver bracelet, and he's in truck-driver attire: orange thermal shirt, green overshirt, John Deere cap.

It's taking me a moment to catch up to Lou's abrupt change in subject. Feelings? We had been talking about NAFTA, how he supported it—"I was there before Clinton, for Chrissake!"—and how this position, along with so many others, goes completely against the Lou Dobbs–ian economic-isolationist mythology that exists in American culture today. Mythology—that's been his main point. As in: a false collective belief. As in: so much utter bullshit. And: "I let the liberal mainstream media define me. That was my mistake. I was stupid, and I was arrogant." He's made this point often over the past few days, not with rage so much as regret, and after he said it this last time, he fell silent, gazed with some interest out his window, so apparently he's found some reason for switching subjects.

He looks at me, expecting something. He is a man who speaks surprisingly softly, until he doesn't anymore, and he becomes a fabulous booming tuba: "Why do they say that? It's incorrect. It should be just 'I feel bad.' "

"That's true—"

"That doesn't bother you?"

We spend a few solid minutes on this, on adjectives, adverbs, various shameful usage errors. It's wrong! It makes no earthly sense! He needs to look something up, pulls out his laptop. I make the mistake of noting he uses a Mac, saying that's funny; I had him more as a PC guy.

"What?" he says. "It's bad? It's good? What?"

It's nothing. Absolutely nothing. I tell him I have a Mac. "We have something in common," I offer.

It goes on like this. Hours and hours like this. Days like this. It doesn't matter if it's a serious topic. It doesn't matter if it's an utterly asinine one. Lou engages, Lou fires. Lou doesn't duck. Lou doesn't retreat. Lou reloads and Lou refires. That the battles are nearly always of his own making does not go unnoticed.

"I'm so damn combative," he says, laughing. "Jeezus. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, you could dial that back," I say.

"Another thing I need to work on—"

"I'd put that one toward the top of the list, frankly."

"Yes, dear."

I can't say exactly how it is I've taken on the role of nagging wife over the past few days I've spent with Lou. It is not the only persona he calls out in me. Mother, campaign manager, shrink, cohort, brat. The thing about Lou is, there's a lot to him. And you can say anything to him. In fact, the more you take him on, the more Lou you get. It is an oddly fascinating sport. Hanging out with Lou Dobbs is like reluctantly going over to the nerdy smart kid's house (because your mother made you) and he turns out to have the keys to an entire amusement park.

I have spent a good deal of my time with Lou trying to fix Lou, urging him to become more, well, normal. (Really, you can say anything to him.) I have frankly told him that I would like him to stop being the guy with the wacko political views and join the sane crowd. "I am going to get right on that—" he has said, and I have told him how much I appreciate that, because I am having a hard time reconciling the Lou in my mind—a big, bouncy head on CNN going on and on about illegal immigration in ways I rarely could stand to listen to, or, more accurately, didn't see a reason to bother listening to—with…this Lou.

This Lou is solicitous. Vastly intelligent. A fun guy to debate, because he believes so passionately in what he's arguing about—whether it's adverbs or border security or mashed potatoes. People where I come from would enjoy this Lou. I wonder why he's allowed himself to say foolish things (illegal immigrants spread leprosy; Obama should produce his birth certificate) that welcome others to so easily turn him into a cartoon.

Say "Lou Dobbs" in a room full of the left-of-center crowd and you're likely to hear ugly words. Racist. nophobe. "Populist madman," said Fortune recently. "Blithering idiot," said Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Hysteria and jingoism" were the words The Nation picked.

There's little doubt that Lou is often just…reckless. Spouts without fully considering the implications, then finds himself stuck defending something even he thinks is ridiculous. Get Lou talking and you find he's so much more nuanced than any of his ill-conceived sound bites. The real Lou has potential. Here is a public figure who has seemingly little control over his own image. I suppose it's that flaw that leaves me sitting here, next to Lou, thinking: This guy's a fir-upper.

It's important to note here that his radio program, just two years old, already scores about a million listeners a week. So he gets plenty of love.

You are the best Lou! I hope you run for the Presidency! Keep speaking up and speaking out.… you have a HUGE following.… you are EXCELLENT!!!

Thanks for speaking out for America as we once knew it. Our Great America is over for the very reasons you were speaking out about. Our borders, our health care, our politics, our military, and on and on and on. But, at least you told it like it is! Thanks!

Just like Captain Sully, you steer this ship and all on board, really well!

But what of the hate? If, as he maintains, it comes from a place of misunderstanding, if his image among his detractors is wrong, if he thinks he's let others define him so terribly incorrectly—doesn't he have any interest in doing something about it?

"Of course I do."

"Then why are you giving me such a hard time trying to fix you?"

"I'm sorry if I'm ruining your day—"

"I am just trying to help."

"If you help me any more, my ego will be the size of a belt buckle."

One morning, Debi, his real wife, answers the door. She tries to manage the three tiny barking dogs protesting hysterically and without consolation about how horrible life has become now that a stranger has appeared in the foyer. She is on crutches. "The parking lot at Rite Aid," she tells me. "I was carrying packages, I couldn't see, I stepped in a pothole." She wears shiny black oversize men's Nike high-tops—the only thing that will fit on her swollen foot. She makes loving notice of Kurby, the apricot toy poodle, "the alpha," shivering like a tiny outboard motor before me in a spasm of terror. She points her crutch at Kurby, pets him with it, says, "Kurby, forgodsakes."

Debi is Mexican-American, which makes no sense whatsoever, given that Lou is supposed to be anti-Latino and anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, at least if you listen to the chattering class. I've never heard Lou use his wife's ethnicity to defend himself against the charges of racial intolerance. Apparently he never…goes there. Debi's mother, from Mexico, lives here on the farm. Lou and Debi have been married for twenty-eight years and they've raised four kids together. The youngest, twin girls, are both at Harvard, and the house has a hushed quality, an empty-nest feeling of now what?

In the kitchen, Lou holds his phone, waiting for a call, and Debi leans on her crutches, and the two tell me farm stories, saying how much they love this place, 300 acres of rolling pastures with white horse fencing, and chestnut mares grazing, and Cobretti the stud. And the annoying mini horse, Scoobie, they got talked into. Oh, and one time they got a goat. Oh, that was funny. They put the goat in the back of the pickup, drove home laughing. What the hell, a goat! The goat, when they got home, went bonkers, kicked and screamed and ran in circles while they chased, until finally it kicked its way through the fence, into a pasture, through another fence, while they continued to give chase. They lost it. Days later, they spotted it at a neighboring farm, grazing, happy as sin. "We need to go tell them that's our goat," Debi said to Lou. He agreed. Then they thought about it some more. They got to talking about the meaning of the phrase "our goat." They decided they didn't have the goat long enough for it to be considered "our goat," and so they ran quietly and triumphantly home.

In the kitchen, looking out the back window at the trees in silhouette, they tell tractor stories and swan stories, too. Yeah, and this farmhouse, Remember when this was just one tiny window back here? Oh, he forgot about that! And remember the roof? Oh, the roof! They are a couple with inside jokes, an inside language. She calls him "husband." He calls her "wife." She reminds him of a financial thing he has to read on the radio today, and he pours her tea. He thinks her crutches are too short, worries about her back. She thinks he knows nothing about broken ankles, or backs, and he should stay out of it.

Later, when she's out of the room, I tell Lou, "I really like your wife."

"Me, too!" he says.

"I'm just saying…"

"You mean what is a nice, normal, intelligent person like her doing with a silly old bastard like me?" he says.

"I didn't say that."

"Yeah, you did."

Yeah, I guess I did.

We head to the living room, cozy and dark and filled floor to ceiling with books. Kurby hops on Lou's lap, and Lou strokes his back, and Kurby drops dead asleep. For the record, Lou likes big dogs, used to have big dogs. "But now all we have left are these little squirrels."

We return to the subject of Lou being stupid and arrogant.

"Politically, you do get lumped in with the wackos," I point out.

"Who's doing the lumping?" he says. "Is it The New York Times? Is it The Washington Post? The L.A. Times? Look, I've sat down with those editors. I'm an inconvenience. Well, first I was an inconvenience. Then I became an obstacle."

"I'm throwing 'paranoid' in with stupid and arrogant," I tell him. Because this is kind of infuriating. To say he's let others define him is to take no responsibility. He knows better than that.

"Maybe a dash of lazy, but not paranoid," he says.

I tell him it's annoying to hear him go all victim here. "Listen, if your image is wrong, fix it! Explain yourself to people."

"I really don't know why anyone would want to bother."

"Bother?"

"Taking the time to rethink or reexamine my positions on anything," he says. "I guess I despair of the possibility, or I don't think people are interested in the reality. I think their preconceptions are all very comfortable, and I'm not sure they'd go to the trouble to really understand, nor am I sure I could build an argument as to why they should go to the trouble to find out who the hell I really am and where I'm coming from."

"Well, you can't just surrender to being misunderstood by the MSNBC crowd," I say.

"I can't?"

"Not if it's not true. And you should stop making guest appearances on Fox News, by the way. It's not helping things."

"Why should I not go to Fox News? Should I go to MSNBC?"

"Yes! Mix it up. Talk to the people who disagree with you."

"Do you think they'd have the guts to bring an independent onto MSNBC? Are you shitting me? Are you kidding? Have you looked at their ratings? Have you looked? They're scared to death. They have a corporate agenda. MSNBC is GE's gift to the Obama administration! 'And please, give us some more defense contracts. It's all good!'"

"That's probably not the way you want to approach them—"

"I never said I wanted to approach them."

"Well, we're going to have to do something about your image before we launch the campaign."

"Campaign?"

"I am not working on your presidential campaign if you don't start working on your optics. And that means no more appearances on Fox News. I'm sorry."

He closes his eyes. He wants me to go home, I can just tell.

"I never said I'm running for president," he says.

"You never said you aren't."

"No, I haven't. I'm not ruling anything out. I don't know what I'm going to do."

"You're running for president."

"If you say so."

"You're considering it."

"I am."

"You're talking to Debi about it?"

"I am."

"And she says?"

"I think that's off the record—"

"But she's not against it—"

"She's probably more open to considering it than she's ever been."

"Oh, my God, you're running for president."

One hundred and eight first-person references in seventy-one minutes for this president last night. He was saying "I" or "me" more than one time a minute. And before we get into my thoughts criticizing the president and his first-person references, we're gonna talk about your thoughts. I want to hear from you. 877-55-DOBBS. 877-55-DOBBS. As always, yours is the most important voice on this broadcast.

At the radio station, Lou tells me he's surrounded by Communists. Slade, his ecutive producer, waves when he hears the pronouncement. Slade's 30, energetic, fiercely liberal, has worked with Lou for seven years, possesses brainpower mighty and flexible enough to enter and inhabit Lou's mind and exit it unscathed each day. "How many do you want?" he says to Lou, and Lou says, "I'll take three," and in moments Slade returns with a small stack of Chips Ahoy cookies. Slade retains possession of the bag, rationing the sugar throughout the broadcast, weekdays from 2 to 5 p.m.

On radio, Lou is more relad than he ever was on CNN, which is probably as much a factor of the medium as it is of Lou's overarching sense of emancipation. The rumors that he was unceremoniously dumped from CNN last November are inaccurate. The real story, he insists, is far less exciting than that—the end result of months of negotiations he can't detail, and neither can CNN, because both signed a "nondisparagement agreement." It was an amicable parting, Lou insists over and over again, each time wistfully making mention of his "old friends over there." It was sad, he says. If he was angry about anything, it was the direction of the network, which he largely saw as "uninspired—and the plummeting ratings certainly didn't contradict my opinion." He was with CNN for nearly thirty years, was right there alongside Ted Turner when the damn thing started, so of course watching it slip away was hard. But hey, things change; it was like one day you wake up and find the whole neighborhood's gone to shit. Mr. Independent. He no longer fit. And why did he no longer fit? It wasn't that he'd changed politically or stylistically, at least not since his remake, when he morphed from Moneyline business anchor to fretful populist on the renamed Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003. He had started Moneyline way back in 1980, became Wall Street's premier emcee, successfully holding a beat all his own on a franchise he had built on his own. In 1999 he left CNN briefly in a surprise move to catch the dot-com wave and head Space.com, a Web site about astronomy. The venture was unsuccessful, and he returned with much fanfare to CNN in 2001. The U.S. economy and its attendant political landscape had vastly changed in the interim, and so had Dobbs. Champion of the American middle class! That's how the revamped Dobbs came to define himself in the wake of September 11 and corporate scandals. Secure America's borders, keep Americans safe—not just from creepy terrorists lurking in its shadows but from the "elites" within, from the greedy CEO SOBs intent on robbing the middle class of the American Dream itself. On Lou Dobbs Tonight, he came out swinging, and he held tighter and tighter to his narrative in the face of controversy, dedicating broadcast after broadcast to issues of illegal immigration and the evils of outsourcing. The show earned him a huge following, spiking as high as 2.1 million viewers, and plenty of awards, including an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement.

Critics said the Champion of the Middle Class act was a tricky sell for Dobbs, seeing as he was a Harvard-educated rich guy with a fancy estate and his own private jet.Then again, he was a self-made man, having grown up without privilege in rural Texas and Idaho—football player, student-council president, Ivy League scholarship, train ticket east to the unknown. When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro–Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.

Lou's standing at CNN was strong when Bush was in office, but then came Obama. "Did I become stupid in 2008 but I was a genius in 2006?" he says. "Because in one instance I'm criticizing Obama and the other I'm criticizing Bush? I mean, good Lord, give me a break. It's staring you and everybody else in the face. It's an absurdity. It's an inconsistency. And by God, it's pure hypocrisy."

As for his own role in the break with CNN, he is quick to defend and deflect. Did he simply go way too far out on a limb when he gave voice to the birther-conspiracy fringe last year? Even Bill O'Reilly steered clear of that one.

"Eight days," he says to me. "I talked about it on TV for eight days. In nearly thirty years' worth of broadcasting. That makes me a birther? Give me a break. I said all along that I believed Obama was a citizen. But if so many people were demanding to see the long-form birth certificate, why wouldn't he just produce the damn thing? I wasn't questioning his birthright. I was questioning his political instincts."

Whatever his intentions or his calculations, the birther mess was the beginning of the end. Lou became a marked man: the anti-Obama voice at a network that may have claimed to be moderate but that Lou saw as overly pro-Obama.

And how, he wonders, does that square with his anti-Bush voice? Does anyone remember how much he ragged on Bush? Does anyone remember he called for Bush's impeachment? No, he thinks, no one seems to remember that. Read his last two books, both best sellers. War on the Middle Class (2006) and Independents Day (2007). Anti-idiots-in-Washington: That was his theme. Those books were written when Bush was in the White House. In chapters like "The Imperious Presidency" and "The Politics of Deceit," he excoriates Bush for failing America, deceiving America, running roughshod with the Constitution. Bush. Republicans, Democrats, throw the bums out! That's Mr. Independent! But now that Obama is in office, he thinks, the mainstream national media can't handle Lou Dobbs, can't handle criticism of its chosen leader, Barack H. Obama. (He always puts the H in there.) That, anyway, is his version of the falling-out with CNN.

Of course, Mr. Independent still calls himself Mr. Independent. But tune in to his radio show and you hear all the conservative talking points, all the Barack H. Obama bashing, the come on, freak out with me, people! tone with which he invites callers to join him in eulogy as this country takes its "sharp left turn" to hell. I can't even listen to that Lou, not for very long. I can't listen to him cheer the oncoming East Coast blizzard as evidence that Al Gore is a blubbering fool. Radio Lou, to me, becomes a dull hum, like so many other dull hums—not nearly as frightening as Beck or as deranged as Limbaugh or as egomaniacal as O'Reilly, but among the same chorus. Why is radio Lou not more like personal Lou?

I am certainly not the first to notice a difference. Affable is the word that often comes up from reporters, even staunch critics who meet Lou Dobbs for the first time. He's Mike Huckabee without all the God; he's Bob Dole after the 1996 campaign. (He could tell jokes!) He's Ronald Reagan with a reachable heart. And yet affable suggests he works at it, a glad-handing smiling salesman with some charm offensive. That isn't it at all. His ego is an aura, of course, substantial enough to affect barometric pressure, of course—no entertainer and no politician could survive without as much—and lurking beneath is a temper you suspect could explode with little warning. But on top of that he's soft, empathic. Before I got to his house this morning, he called my hotel to tell me there was snow. "It's a light coating, but it is accumulating, so if you want to factor that into your travel plans…" When I got us lost in Times Square a few days ago, all turned around on the way to a destination I promised him I knew by heart, he could sense my frustration, my disgust with my stupid self, and rather than make the easy jokes, he charged chivalrously forth to find help. He sent me an e-mail hours after one of our times together to apologize for a comment I may have perceived as cruel. "I meant that it's charming—not a negative at all." When I asked him about his dainty bracelet, he flashed a guilty smile, said, "I look like a man who wears jewelry, don't I? Don't I?" daring me to disagree. He then explained it was a twenty-fifth-wedding-anniversary present from Debi. "Aw, that's really sweet," I said. "That's exactly what I said when I opened it," he told me. "And I put it on, and let's leave it at that." He believes in the value of nice. He likes books with happy endings. He likes symmetry in design. He enjoys watching birds. He knows only a private God. He stopped going to church at age 6 because he could not bear the image of hell.

We're eating dinner at the Tick Tock Diner, and Lou's ordered a massive plate of roast turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy. "Okay, so are we done?" he says. We have been chewing in silence for a few minutes, and he's getting bored. "Well?" he says, like a kid inviting another out to play. "What else do you want to talk about? Where have I left the traveled path, and how may I return to conformity and comfort?"

I tell him I'm switching gears. "I've decided to be nice. I want to know the real Lou."

"Oh, my God, you're finding your empathy place—"

"This is me, trying to understand."

"Yeah, well, this is me, trying to overcome my own fatigue with the issue of people not understanding me."

"Never mind."

"Fine."

I spill my beer. He hands me a pile of napkins. I tell him I have a friend, an Iranian-American, who said she was afraid to meet Lou because he'd probably cover her up in bubble wrap and ship her back to the motherland.

What?

He's going to make me explain? He's going to pretend he didn't get the joke when he appeared on The Daily Show and they greeted him with a little Mexican band playing? I go right to the heart of the issue, right for the gut. If I'm going to fix Lou, I'm going to have to show him just how broken I think he is. I tell him about some time I spent last summer reporting a story in the blueberry fields of Maine, raking berries with migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, living for a time in their camp.

He looks at me, trying to appear engaged. It is, I realize later, a kindness. Or perhaps a patronizing. Like, he's never heard this shit before? Like, he's not been sitting in the mud of the illegal-immigration issue for the past seven years? Like, he didn't grow up working in the potato fields alongside legal and illegal immigrants?

I go on and on, all virtuous. Listen, Lou, you shouldn't blame these people. You shouldn't blame the illegal immigrants; they're just coming here to make some money to feed their families back home. And if our spoiled-brat high school kids won't work in the lettuce fields and the orange groves, we should be glad someone will. We should be thanking the migrant workers for picking our food—not shunning them, forcing them to hide and live in squalor. And if our greedy growers won't pay a living wage, well, shame on us for allowing that. Shame on us! We sit in our restaurants and eat our fresh lettuce and our juicy tomatoes, and it's because of the migrant workers—legal or illegal—that we spoiled-brat Americans can afford that feast.

"Finally we agree on something," he says. He slurps some potatoes. He is so sick of having this conversation with idiots who don't listen, fools who simply buy the anti-Dobbs rhetoric put out by activist groups needing a villain. That's how he sees it. A propaganda war he lost because he was stupid or he was arrogant or he was just plain reckless.

"Look, I've said from the beginning that the illegal immigrant is the only rational actor in this whole mess. I have said it a thousand times." He picks up his phone and calls Slade. "Can you put that thing up on the Web site again?" he says. "The thing about illegal immigration?" It's a video montage I look at later, more than thirty snippets dating back to 2003, of Lou saying, "The illegal immigrant is the only rational actor in this whole thing," over and over again.

"Have I not said I've got great respect for the work ethic, the family values of most illegal aliens working in this country? Have I not said that their wages should be increased?"

"How can we get to the employer who is so shamelessly exploiting the illegal alien and so shamelessly flouting U.S. law?"

"Why are you willing to support a system that is exploitative of people whom we all respect, who have a terriffic work ethic, who are outstanding human beings?"

His defense of the immigrant himself—the person here legally or here illegally—has, he says, been not just overlooked by the activists who speak out against Lou Dobbs, but viciously distorted.

And the media, he says, eat it up.

"It's inconvenient to the national liberal media to disturb themselves with the thought that maybe what they're witnessing really is sordid and they shouldn't be a part of it," he says.

Lazy. In the Dobbsian view of America, the mainstream media isn't evil because it's liberal but because it's lazy. And Washington is utterly corrupt, has sold out, Democrats and Republicans alike. And corporate America is an insatiable pig. He is getting revved up. He rights his posture. He shakes his head, like a dog with a fresh kill. "These people HAVEN'T GOT THE GUTS! The liberal media, political parties, haven't got the GUTS to ask the questions. You know, why is there illegal immigration? Because both political parties sold out to the illegal employers who make up the business establishment. That's why there's illegal immigration!

"Why is there a border-security problem? It's a calculated cost of doing business, that's why. A terrorist strike? Oh, they think, the hell with that. They think, What does that take out? Ah, how many people does that really take out?"

He requires no prompting for any of this; he is a lone man at a diner, raging over a plate of turkey. "Look at what we're talking about in this country over the last decade. Middle-class jobs being outsourced. No one wants to take the time to say, hey, those are real people who are really being devastated by public policy, by default, by business practices. No one gives a damn. No one seemingly in power gives a damn. And what the hell happened to a national press that's supposed to look out for folks? Oh, it's not popular to be concerned about American citizens and the American dream—what this nation stands for. No no, that's an inconvenient narrative. Let's focus on political correctness; let's talk about the orthodoxy of right thinking. You know, this shit has an impact on the body politic, an ennui that has settled on this nation, a disengagement, an alienation, a polarization. And then we retreated to the Obama magical mystery tour with seemingly the entire national media cheering him on and setting boundaries as to what can be asked and what can be said. And as to the issues that really matter, well, who cares? And the issues that really matter are: Why in the hell are half of our kids in high school, Hispanic kids, black kids, dropping out of high school? Oh, we're a big, rich country, we have time to be fools, and there will be no consequences. Well, ask those millions of kids who are dropping out of high school what the consequences are. They're collateral damage; hell, they don't matter.… That's the attitude of the power structure in this country! We've had a thirty- or forty-year war on drugs in which the poor, the minorities, are the victims. Oh, the hell with that, we can accept that collateral damage, they don't matter: That seems to be the tacit statement of values on the part of the American establishment! You, me, who have a vote? We're as guilty as anybody."

He pushes his plate away.

I wonder what to say. I fight the urge to turn into his mother and tell him to eat. I see something wonderful emerge in his display of anger, passion, and eloquence. I see an honest man—a supercharged fighter fighting the only way he knows how: by arguing his righteousness whether anyone is listening or not. I see a candidate. Could he survive a bid for the White House? Will he really go for it? The national mood has never been more receptive to an independent contender. He doesn't seem to be courting the tea partiers who need a leader—or they're not courting him. He has told me of several secret meetings in Washington, power lunches and power dinners about things he can't yet talk about. One morning Slade produced an article about Senator Chuck Schumer having met with Lou Dobbs to talk illegal immigration, to compromise, to think through the problem together.

Lou told me he's meeting with people on all sides of the illegal-immigration issue. He wants them all in the same room, and he wants them all to talk this thing out. "We are going to solve this damn thing. Solve it."

He insists the mission is the act of "a private citizen." Nothing more. He has substantially tempered his position on illegal immigration. He has softened his language, doesn't say "illegal alien" anymore. He has appeared on Telemundo publicly announcing his support of amnesty.

In reaction, the folks who created loudobbsforpresident.org, along with many others, have withdrawn their support of his potential candidacy, calling Lou a hypocrite.

I would not vote for him for dog catcher now. I was a strong supporter of you, Lou. But, I see that your colors are not red, white and blue.

I return several times to the question of whether or not Lou is planning a presidential run. It seems so obvious—the softening of the rhetoric, the reaching across the aisle to the likes of ultraliberal Schumer—and it seems so Lou. Can this guy not run for president? (And no, forget any of that talk of him going for the Senate—Lou only goes big.) So why won't he just announce his White House bid? Early one afternoon, he promised he'd give me something on this. He kept hemming and hawing all day. Seven hours later, he finally said, "Let's just say it would be reckless to say anything other than 'we'll see.' "

"Jesus H. Christ! That's what I waited all this time for?"

"I'm sorry."

"I really hate you right now."

"I'm sorry. It would be reckless!"

"So, be reckless!"

He thought that one over, seemed to savor the notion. I never saw eyes actually twinkle like that. "Are you sure that's what we want in a president?" he said.

It's late. It's like two degrees outside. New Jersey is a solid brick of ice. Scott, his driver, is driving. Lou is back here speaking softly, without purpose, spurting tired thoughts.

"I wish I didn't care, I'll tell you. But what, I'm supposed to just shut off my brain and close my heart? Just simply let go?"

"…I mean, if you have any intellectual capacity at all! My God! Go figure!"

"…DOES THIS ADMINISTRATION HAVE A SINGLE DAMN OAR IN THE WATER?"

I thought for sure he would have wound down by now. I thought he'd move off politics, off America, off the indignation. Doesn't he ever simply daydream about…breakfast or something? Golf? About what's awaiting on the TiVo at home?

He sees something out the window. "Whoa," he says. "Oh God, Scott! Scott! Oh, Scott, will you do me a favor? Will you, please? Will you turn around and go into the Rite Aid parking lot?"

"Yes, sir."

"I just have to check. Have to see. Oh Jesus."

Scott pulls the car into the lot, and Lou jumps out. No coat. Just his shirtsleeves. He motions for Scott to follow him with the car, aim the headlights. The store is closed. There are no cars at all here. Lou is searching. Scott is searching. Lou sees it, points! He comes running back to the car.

"Can you freaking believe it?" he says to Scott.

"No, sir."

"Can you believe it? It was three months ago that Debi fell! THREE MONTHS? Are you shitting me? They can't fill a freaking pothole? THEY DON'T EVEN CARE! CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? What if some old lady falls into this thing? It could do more damage than a broken ankle. Can you believe this?"

"No, sir."

He goes back to the pothole, and Scott puts the window up, but we can hear Lou clear as a foghorn all the same. "THEY DON'T EVEN CARE! I should sue! CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?"

The injustice is unbearable, and he stands out there trying to bear it, in the bitter cold, like a snorting bull, steam coming out of his nose and his mouth. "THEY DON'T EVEN CARE!"

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